Current Music: Elton John – “You’ll Always Be Beautiful In My Eyes”

Hallo allemaal – sorry dat ik zolang niet geschreven heb. Our internet broke on Sunday – some construction people snapped a cable or something – but it’s supposed to (FINALLY!) be fixed tomorrow, so I’m writing a post now in Word and I’ll paste it in tomorrow, barring some unforeseen disaster… *crosses fingers*. So this will be long.

Well, classes have started – or, rather, my one class has started: English Linguistics. Part of it is phonology, and the rest is syntax. It looks pretty easy – so far it’s the same stuff I did back at UF – and I like the teachers (an American and a Dutchman). I feel a little out of place in the class because I’m the only non-Dutch student in the class and all the other students speak Dutch to each other when we’re not ‘officially’ in class, but that’ll improve, I know, and I do like being a native English speaker because apparently the aim of this course is to ‘get inside the heads’ of native speakers. Well. That’s easy. ;)

I do have one complaint, however – stupid Dutch scheduling. I’ve never seen such a ridiculous system. My particular class is divided alphabetically into two groups, then each of those two groups is split into phonology and syntax (taught by two different teachers), and then we meet at certain times for the first three weeks, then switch times for the rest of the course… I don’t see why we can’t just have one teacher and one group and one certain time and have that be it! And this isn’t even as weird as it gets – at least this is all from 11.00 to 13.00 and in the same room. The Second Language Acquisition course I want to take next block meets from 9.00-11.00 on Mondays in one place, and then from 13.00-15.00 on Wednesdays and Fridays in another place. Why do they do stuff like that?! It makes it so hard to schedule other courses when they jump all over the place and have some of the stuff in the morning and some in the afternoon! If I want to take that class – and I really do; it sounds so interesting, especially since I’m over here learning a second language – then I have to switch to the morning Boswell class, and then ask the teacher for special permission to miss Mondays of class so I can go to Boswell. It’s so ridiculous! I don’t want to miss Mondays. I just want to take the @#$%^&* class! Sigh.

Changing the subject… S and I are practically living on macaroni and tortellini enzo these days – we have no oven, no blender, no toaster… only a microwave and a burner… so we’re really limited in what we can cook and it’s ticking us off. I’m glad I have the bike for exercise…

Exercise. That reminds me. I accidentally went to the wrong ‘group’ of my syntax class on Monday (that was for the A-L last names, but I didn’t know the system then) and there was an Italian girl in that half, whom I knew from the exchange student day on Saturday. I was close to the front of class, and she was near the middle. So at the break (yes, they have a break in the middle of class… I haven’t decided yet whether or not I like that) I got up and went over to her, and the first thing out of her mouth was, “What sport do you play?” I was kind of taken by surprise, but then she asked, “Swimming?” and I said, “Yeah, swimming and basketball” and she nodded like, yeah, I knew it. I was really surprised and asked her how she knew, if she was a swimmer herself or something, and she tried to explain (in broken English) that no, she wasn’t – it was just that because she was sitting behind me, she’d noticed my broad shoulders. (We had a shoulder-comparison contest on the waterfront at camp and I won, LOL – I even beat K, and she swims for her college.) So apparently you can tell just by looking at me that I’m athletic. Hmm. Camp counselors (from when I was a camper) are the only ones ever to tell me that – they all used to ask if I was a swimmer. (But the funny thing is – back then, I wasn’t! LOL!)

Anyway, so: exercise. Here, that’s my bike. So after I had my first riding-my-bike-in-the-freezing-Dutch-rain experience (today, coming home from class), I coasted up to the Rheyngaerde bike shed thinking nothing but “Oh good, now I can go inside and get warm and dry,” as I squeezed my brakes… and snap, there went my right hand brake AGAIN!!! This is getting really ridiculous (D: TIGRR!) – they just fixed my brakes on Saturday! Sigh again.

I’ve also been having bad dreams – not every night, but often enough that it’s weird. I never have bad dreams, but in the past week I’ve dreamed (a) that people were chasing me trying to kill me, (b) that five guys tried to rape me, and (c) (last night) that I accidentally killed three tiny babies, including one with big blue eyes whom I was really attached to, while trying to hit someone (don’t ask… I don’t know). And then I had that train wreck dream before… and some others, but I can’t remember them now. It’s just so weird. I keep waking up in the middle of the night from these annoying dreams, and that, combined with the bike exercise, is making me fall asleep at weird hours during the day. (Mom: I’m adopting your 15.00 ‘naptime’, haha.)

S and I went out with A last night to a movie – a ‘sneak preview’, so we didn’t know what the movie was until it hit the screen. We took my bike there, but since S absolutely refuses to ride on the back for some reason, he pedaled and I rode on the back. It’s actually a fairly pleasant way to travel; the part that sucks is jumping off at every stop, because the blood collects in your feet while you sit there and then it hurts to jump off. Plus you have to really trust the person driving – I had ridden on the back of L’s bike several times before (including with three very large bags) and that was fine, she’s a born-and-bred Hollander and she knew exactly what she was doing, but with S… the American who hasn’t ridden a bike in 10 years… I was a little nervous, LOL! And it was a little shaky for me at points, mostly on hills, but there was nobody on the road and we both escaped with no major injuries. :) Anyway, the movie turned out to be Identity, and it wasn’t bad – a lot of blood and stuff, but cleverly done. (And don’t tell me that’s the reason for my bad dreams – they started way before that.) Anyway, then we went to Mick O’Connell’s, the Irish pub for the international students, which was packed - absolutely stuffed – because it was Tuesday and that’s when everyone goes there. I don’t like the whole bar scene anyway (I always feel out of place because I really just don’t like most alcoholic drinks – they don’t taste good to me at all) but this was just insane. I did see a few people I knew, and there was a lot of English being spoken, but that didn’t really make it any better. A had to leave to do some homework, and I had class today, so I left with her and took the bus, and left my bike for S.

The Swedish girl, J, came down today and the three of us talked Dutch like we planned. In situations like that, where I know I know what I’m doing, I have absolutely no trouble speaking. I just don’t like talking when I’m afraid I’m not going to understand the person’s answer. I feel intimidated talking to ‘real Hollanders’ so I clam up, and then I get frustrated with myself. J’s 33 years old and a veterinarian, with 2 small children, and she’s only been studying for a month on her own, using the Help 1 book, but for that length of time she’s surprisingly good – she even said ‘ik heb ___ gedaan’ at some point, which impressed me, that she’d picked that up on her own. Even her pronunciation is usually decent. She says Dutch is similar to Swedish in some ways, so if she doesn’t know a word, she just takes the Swedish word and ‘makes it a little bit Dutch’… LOL! Anyway, she’s an A-level, S is a B-level, and I’m a C-level, so it works out nicely. His Dutch is simple enough for her to understand, and I know enough that I can correct both of them, LOL… I feel weird doing that, like a know-it-all, but they said they want me to, so… yeah. (And it does feel good to be in the ‘teacher’ role. I really think I’d enjoy teaching a language, if I don’t become an interpreter…) The problem is that now I’ve forgotten a lot of the rules that I used to rely on, so when someone asks me why something is the way it is, I often can’t tell them anymore, like I used to be able to. It just is. My Linguistics professors would say that’s because of Universal Grammar. :) That’s the way I always learn a language – I learn the rules, and then after speaking correctly for a while, I forget them and just talk. So it’s funny to see S kinda going through the same stage I went through. For example, he was saying “Ik vind Nederland heel verschillend dan Florida” and I corrected him, saying that it should be ‘anders’ instead of ‘verschillend’. But then he wanted to know why, and I couldn’t tell him. I could give examples like ‘een groot verschil tussen ___ en ___’ and ‘allemaal verschillende dingen’ enzo, but that was it. He was asking me stuff like “So you say it this way if it’s an adjective?” and stuff, and all I could say was “I don’t know – that’s just how it is.” I guess this is how P and M felt when I would do stuff like that, asking about rules and such. Weird – the shoe’s on the other foot now. :)

Guess what I found out? They’re tearing down this building. Right after we leave – literally right after we leave – it’s being ripped down. That kinda makes me wonder even more why we pay so much to live here…

I’m getting S hooked on GTST now, haha! He says he’s only watching because of the ‘lekkere meisjes’, but hey, you gotta start somewhere… ;)

Hope the Net’s back tomorrow so I can post this. But now it’s 21.52 and I’m going to go read some of my Boswell book and try to tune out S yelling and throwing things at the TV – Oranje is playing again, and they’re losing, so he’s in a foul mood. (But he admitted to liking Celine Dion yesterday (“If you tell anybody, I’ll kill you, but…”), so he can yell all he wants, LOL!)

Ciao!